Side Squeeze (Jasper Falls 6)

“Easy, Bray. She’s Giovanni’s wife now. That makes her your cousin, too.”

“That’s gonna take some time to process.”

Mariella let him inside where the scent of newly painted walls greeted. She searched for a light switch and found one in the hall.

“Where’s all their stuff?”

There was a sofa but no tables or lamps. The kitchen had a table and two chairs but no curtains, and the cabinets were mostly empty.

“I think they cleared everything out after Ward died.” Giovanni said Erin had planned to sell the house, but changed her mind when they got together.

Braydon got to work measuring the space and jotting numbers in a small notepad. She followed him from room to room, silently taking in the vacant surroundings.

“What kind of addition are they thinking of?”

“Giovanni said she wants to totally transform the house. He wants the master bedroom gutted and completely redone.”

Mariella didn’t see anything wrong with the master bedroom but supposed everyone had their own taste when it came to decorating. Unlike the rest of the house that had been freshly painted, with newly finished floors, the master bedroom room had been gutted down to the studs.

She left Braydon to his work and drifted down the narrow hall toward the other bedrooms. The first one was clearly Erin’s. It had furniture and the bedding was made, clothes still hung in the closets and filled the drawers. A house plant with long tapered leaves hung in the corner, its vines strung from each curtain rod and dangling almost to the floor.

“You look like you could use some water,” she said to the plant. A quick trip to the kitchen for a glass of water and she returned to the potted vine. “There you go.”

Mariella continued exploring, but there really wasn’t much to see. At the end of the hall stood a narrow door, different from the others. She knew in an instant it was Harrison’s room.

The knob was broken as if someone had bashed in the lock. The paint around the inner moldings was nicked and scuffed, unlike the freshly painted trim throughout the rest of the house.

She didn’t see any lamps or light switches, so she flipped on the flashlight of her phone. High school paraphernalia sagged off the walls. Faded pictures and old sports tickets triggered a strong sense of nostalgia.

A layer of dust covered the furniture. Laundry was stuffed in the corner, stiff from time and musty from a leak in the ceiling. She recognized his old football jersey, the blue and gold colors causing a strange ache to bloom in her chest.

The room was a forgotten time capsule full of relics he’d left behind. Each item sad and forgotten. She caught her reflection in the dusty mirror and a chill chased over her skin. Did she belong here with the rest of his discarded past?

The bed was small, too small for a high school boy. And the dresser was missing most of the hardware.

The hollow stretched in her chest as she understood Harrison hadn’t abandoned her or his town all those years ago, he abandoned himself. He left himself behind and become someone else. He hadn’t packed a single memento.

She didn’t like the feelings the room stirred, but when she turned to leave, her heart stopped. The sheetrock was caved in, exposing the studs, as if something large and heavy had hit the wall. Something the size of a teenage boy.

Beside the door sat a collapsed bookshelf, splintered at the corners and split along the wood as if someone had smashed it with a hammer.

A floorboard creaked and Braydon filled the cavity of the doorway. “Yikes.”

“It’s Harrison’s room.” She took in the broken furniture, consumed by the misery of this place. “They just left it like this.”

Braydon glanced around the cold room. “Maybe she was waiting for him to come back.”

That was never going to happen. Mariella always thought Harrison had run toward something, but seeing his childhood bedroom changed her thinking.

He’d been running away from whatever happened in this house.

She needed to escape the oppressive sight, and she’d only been there for a few minutes. Harrison had been trapped in this house for the first half of his life.

“I’ll meet you out front,” she said. “I need some air.”

CHAPTER 12

Harrison stared at the stack of rock salt along the back wall of the stockroom, his shoulders tense and his ears ringing. A pack of smokes still sat on the wood table in the corner by his father’s ashtray.

“What the hell am I doing back here?”

The man had some of the heaviest ashtrays and threw them like he was a shot put champion when he was in a rage. Those fuckers could shatter bones before chipping themselves.

He still had a scar from where he took one to the back of the head. It dropped him like a sack of cement, and he’d had a headache for weeks.